Fruitful friction even when working remotely
Remote work restricts your interactions. It makes it hard to maintain informal relationships or talk to people outside your usual circle. However, in order to stimulate innovation, you should nevertheless seek out contrasting views and productive friction.
Most of your interactions are designed to help you do your work, but do little to spur innovation. Adopt these counterintuitive practices to spark creativity:
- Do you have a phone? Use it to make that call and defuse tensions, share an idea or reach out to a senior executive. A quick call is more productive than an email that gets lost in someone’s inbox.
- Take things to the extreme! Are you finding it difficult to get feedback on your ideas? Exaggerate your idea and make it divisive. In doing so, you’ll provoke debate. It could be productive if you contrast your idea with other strong ideas and if you use metaphors.
- Point out differences. You’re not trying to reach a consensus but discuss ideas. Highlight the differences rather than the points in common.
- Go find the experts. Remote connection tools make it easy to organize a discussion with an expert outside your organization or a colleague at a remote site. Share your thoughts and ideas with them.
To go further
“Driving remote innovation through conflict and collaboration”
by Esther Tippmann, Pamela Sharkey Scott and Mark Gantly (MIT Sloan Management Review, 15 April 2021).
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